Since my acquisition of Kinotone’s Sparks a few weeks ago, it turns out I’m now quite familiar with Wavefolding Distortion - which is a big part of this new device. In fact on the Sparks you can modulate that distortion too via LFO and Envelope Filtering, while you don’t have access to 8 different waveforms you get on the Gravity Well.

I guess for the Gravity Well the two key ’blending’ controls here are Volume and Depth - where overall it’s a pretty simple topology, with independent ...

So Fractal Audio Systems has thrown its hat in the ring with its first non-modelling device / unit - the VP4 Virtual Pedalboard Multi-FX Processor - which is quite a departure for the brand.

It’s obviously gunning for Line 6 and Eventide in particular, but also looking to knock out Boss and Strymon Workstation pedals. It has several of its own advantages, but with a number of caveats too. Overall it’s well priced for what it delivers - but for my own preferences it’s still somewhat over-...

Readers of this site will know that I’ve long admired the extraordinary sound-design talents of Cohen Hartman - who’s best known through his SpiralCaster Plays Pedals YouTube Channel. In my opinion he is one of the very finest pedal demo artists there ever was. He has a way of teasing out some truly unique tones and textures from most pedals - and taking them places where others just don’t or can’t seem to venture.

He did a slew of particularly brilliant demos in the lead up to my February ...

Apologies that his is a little late - it took and age to research, compile and complete - and is filled with myriad wonderful fun facts - I sincerely hope you enjoy this one - as a whole heap of work has gone into bringing it to you!

So I spent the whole weekend working on updating my pedal inventory records to figure out exactly where I was at with the Reference Collection, the last time I did that exercise was a couple of years ago. I had kind of mentally estimated that I had around 1.300...

We’re likely living through the age of Lo-Fi - there have been so many pedals that tackle this palette of sounds. Often of a chorusing or tape effects nature - combining filtering, modulation, and saturation style outputs with somewhat vinyl and crackly radio noises onboard.

Very recently we had the all-digital Source Audio Artifakt - which landed for me about a fortnight ago. This overlaps with that quite a bit - not quite so expansive - while there are a number of areas in common.

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Catalinbread has done an amazing job of transforming the quirky 2002 Alesis Bitrman into a compact stompbox pedal format. The Bitrman had 4 different Signal Mangler Flavours / Modes - which are combined with distortion and dual phaser effects for maximum impact, and where you can control the Dry > Wet Mix also.

There’s an excellent article on Catalinbread’s Kula’s Cabinet Blog which goes into further details about the Alesis Bitrman.

Catalinbread refers to this pedal as a Hyper-Deranged...

As narrated by John Snyder (presumably) :

"The Prismatic Wall emulates the Resonance of Sympathetic Strings, producing an effect which is somewhere between a synthesizer and reverb... The Prismatic Wall is what’s known as a Physical Modelling Synthesizer - a type of audio processor that emulates the vibrations of real objects. Here we’re using a variation on a technique called Karplus-Strong Synthesis - which uses a filtered delay line fed back upon itself to recreate the behaviour of a ...

As soon as I saw this intriguing new Artifakt format I immediately thought that it looked like some sort of hybrid crossover between Chase Bliss and Red Panda Labs. Source Audio has really gone to town here - covering off all the essential Lo-Fi manipulation elements in a single pedal - and in Stereo too! So it obviously gets a lot of love from me.

There are 7 different Effects Engines - where you really need a manual on hand for this pedal as there is so much going on, and most of the ...

An interesting fact is that this collaboration almost happened several years ago, but evidently the timing wasn’t right then for various reasons. This time around though there was an added ingredient in the mix - ’Yours Truly!’ - and I was somewhat instrumental in bringing the two sides together and finally making this happen!

It’s great news for us Brits - as these Lastgasp Art Laboratories Pedals have always been somewhat beyond our reach until now.

I obviously recently covered my 9 ...